What the political shift in Colorado and West means for the United States

Kevin Priola was a Republican before he could even vote.

Inspired by Ronald Reagan, he preregistered with the GOP at age 17. He joined the College Republicans at the University of Colorado in Boulder and was elected to the Legislature in 2008, where he's served ever since.

But Priola slowly grew estranged from the GOP, seeing it as more authoritarian than conservative, and last August he became a Democrat.

“I couldn't stomach it,” Priola said of his old party.

He's hardly alone.

For much of its history, the West was Republican ground. Today, it's a bastion of Democratic support, a shift that has transformed presidential politics nationwide. In the last two decades, the Republican ranks in Colorado have shrunk to just a quarter of registered voters.

The transformation is part of a political shift across the West: along the Pacific Coast, through the deserts of Nevada and Arizona, into the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado and New Mexico.

The changes took money, strategy, demographic changes and, not least, a sharp rightward turn by Republicans.

“From a western swing state, it has become a Democratic stronghold,” said pollster Floyd Ciruli.

In 2004, Democrats essentially gave up and wrote the place off; they've carried Colorado in every presidential contest since.

In the last 20 years, the state has gained more than 1.3 million residents, most settling in Denver or the suburbs.

They are younger, more affluent, better educated, and more liberal. In short, Democrats are now much more in tune with Colorado, one of the best-educated and socially liberal states in the country, as the Republican base has gotten older, less educated, more evangelical and more Trumpy.

When Lori Weigel moved to Denver in 1997, she recalled, “the Broncos always won and the Republican Party always won.”

“Now,” the GOP strategist lamented, “we have a losing football team and, statewide, a losing Republican brand.”

The state is “not a playground for the fringe left,” said Chris Hughes, a former Colorado Democratic Party chairman. “It's not a state like Maryland, where whoever the Democrat is they'll win.”

Meantime, Republicans offered up candidates from the tea party movement and fire-breathers like the anti-immigration crusader Tom Tancredo.

“Coloradans tend to be very moderate,” said Democratic strategist Craig Hughes. “Anyone who puts personal ideology over solutions is going to run afoul of the Colorado electorate.”

“Any candidate who wants to win in Colorado has to talk about and have solutions for the issues that matter most to everyday Coloradans,” Democratic Gov. Jared Polis said, ticking those off: education, affordable housing, traffic, congestion.

Dick Wadhams, a fourth-generation Coloradan and longtime GOP campaign consultant, said it's hard these day for Republicans to even get an impartial hearing from voters, regardless of a candidate's personal qualities and beliefs.

He imagines typical Colorado voters saying to themselves, “`We're not going to entrust these offices to the Republican Party, even if these individuals look like they're solid, because the party is crazy overall.'”

Pam Anderson can speak to that firsthand.

The former elections chief in suburban Jefferson County, Anderson describes herself as socially moderate, if not liberal, and has no use for those she calls political bomb-throwers.

Anderson was featured on Time magazine's cover last October as one of “the defenders” fighting to save democracy after she bested a Trump loyalist and election denier to win the GOP nomination for secretary of state, the overseer of Colorado's balloting.

“I was a vocal opponent of everything Trump said about elections,” Anderson said. “Everything.”

Still, she said, opponents ran “millions of dollars in commercials saying I was too MAGA for Colorado.” She leaned back, as if still reeling. “I couldn't raise enough money to combat that.”

Anderson shrugged. She threw up her hands.

She lost by double digits, gone in a tide that delivered Democrats all four statewide offices and underscored a sea change that has remade Colorado and dramatically refashioned the West.